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UK Tory Party Tears Itself Apart
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Like a lot of Western “democracies” here in the UK we essentially have a choice between two parties. However, one party, the Conservatives, or Tories as they are also known, tend to be the dominant party. The Labour Party would be better described as the second eleven, as in a cricket team. With an election year looming in 2024 there are strong indicators that the UK may be looking at a change of team.
Tories are tearing themselves apart
The recent local elections results were “a bloody awful result”, as one put it. With the party’s electoral prospects languishing, the Tories are once again tearing themselves to pieces.
The hard-liners are looking to ‘take back control’, just as the establishment is seeking stability. Conservative grandees, such as Lord Hesseltine, have warned that “the party is tearing itself apart”. Other senior figures are alarmed at an impending Tory implosion, or the prospect of a complete “meltdown”. Matt Hancock stated;
The Conservative Party is finished if it succumbs to a Trumpian-style takeover.
There is a general feeling amongst the hardliners that the civil service is out to prevent them taking up the Tory leadership. This comes after more complaints have been made to the police that Boris Johnson broke lockdown.
The Telegraph - Tory Brexiteers are victims of 'witch hunt' led by Whitehall 'blob'
In today’s Telegraph, one of the leading Conservative-leaning newspapers, one article says;
Sources say MPs are being 'gobbled up like Pac-Man' and active conversations are underway about how to respond - with nothing off the table.
Apparently senior Tories feel that there is witch-hunt against them being led by civil servants.
Rishi Sunak
High hopes that Rishi Sunak’s premiership might rescue them have evaporated as the Tories have been trailing far behind Labour in the polls for months. Downing Street officials still believe there is a “narrow path” to victory. But the internal wranglings make it more than likely that election defeat awaits them.
The King's coronation provided a welcome distraction, temporarily postponing the Tories’ local election post-mortem. However, this delay has only made the scrutiny and discord all the more vicious.
Internal critics are blaming multimillionaire Sunak for being too ‘socialist’!
Rishi Sunak declines to reveal if his investment portfolio benefits from Moderna
It appears that the Tory leader has lost control of his increasingly unruly party. Former ministers openly denounce the direction of policy, whilst dozens of backbench MPs plot a new rebellion over Brexit. According to Ed Vaizey, the Conservative peer:
Whatever the outcome of the election, there will be a battle for the soul of our party in the years ahead.
The fanatical grassroots of the Tories are plotting another takeover, in order to restore the party to ‘true blue conservatism’. Mutinous groups – which nobody has ever heard of before – are springing up every two minutes. This includes the ‘Conservative Democratic Organisation’ (CDO), which wants to give more power to the unhinged Tory membership, and the ‘National Conservatives’.
As described by Tory MP Tobia Ellwood;
Many colleagues from all wings of the party are deeply baffled by not just one, but two splinter groups engaging in this act of self-harm.
The recent ‘NatCon’ conference in London, a three-day affair organised by the American Edmund Burke Foundation, gave a platform to prominent ‘headbangers’ in the party. Among those present were; Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove, and Suella Braverman.
According to one former Cabinet minister, the conference was marked by “indignation and anger”, with many attendees asserting that the party has gone too far to the left and become too ‘soft’.
For Suella Braveman, the event was an opportunity to launch an early leadership campaign. In her bid for the top spot, she has positioned herself further to the right than Attila the Hun, in the hope of securing the support of Tory members in any future ballot. This included demands from the Home Secretary to bring net-migration numbers down to zero.
Albeit Suella Braverman has been surrounded by controversy. From her failure to disclose she worked with an oppressive Rwandan government to the kerfuffle about a speeding fine. However, as seen by many, she has not been sacked because Sunak can not afford to go to war with the Brexiteers.
Similarly Johnson, it is reported, was to be given a Common’s ban of 10 days for ‘partygate’, which would prevent him being subject to a recall-by election. The new allegations are likely to throw this up in the air and means the scandal and investigation can go on until the end of the year.
Other Conservative backbenchers, such as evangelical Christian Miriam Cates, have issued a call for Britain to boost its birth rate, echoing similar appeals from reactionary leaders such as Hungary’s Victor Orban, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile the audience at the recent CDO symposium in Bournemouth was similarly swollen with fuming Tory Brexiteers and Boris Johnson fawners, hell-bent on recapturing the party. Conservative MP Andrea Jenkyns opened the gathering with a rendition of ‘God Save the King’, before telling the assembled crowd:
I look around [at my Tory] colleagues and think, ‘you belong in the Lib Dems, actually’.
Priti Patel, former home secretary, also spoke, putting forward the idea that Sunak and his supporters had “done a better job at damaging our party” over the past year than Labour, and attacking MPs who had helped remove Johnson;
our most electorally successful prime minister since Margaret Thatcher.
Brexiteer ultras in the European Reform Group (ERG) are also up in arms, furious that the government has broken its promise to scrap a swathe of EU laws and regulations that are currently on the statute books. ERG members are planning to take a stand over this betrayal, creating further mayhem for Number 10.
The stage is set for a Tory meltdown.
High hopes that, with Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt at the helm, sanity and control over the Tory Party would be restored seems to have floundered.
Disaster at the general election will cause the ranks of the party to shift even further to the right. This deranged Tory rabble will look back nostalgically to when they had an 80-seat majority under Boris, yearning for more ‘red meat’ policies, in line with their migrant-bashing, hang-‘em, flog-‘em mentality.
This could well lead to a split within the Tory Party, with the one-nation Conservatives peeling away, and those remaining moving further rightwards – a reflection of the wider polarisation in British society. This would be in line with a general trend towards the creation of anti-immigration parties throughout Europe.
Given the mess in the Tory Party, Labour has stepped in to become the ‘party of business’, as well as the ‘party of law and order’. Starmer is in the pocket of the establishment, and has promised to do their bidding. Plus the Labour leader is quite prepared to jump into bed with the Lib Dems, and to draw them into a coalition government that could jointly do the dirty work for the banksters.
Anyhow a Starmer government will, in all likelihood, be a government of crisis. Dealing with persistent high inflation, stagflation and massive debts they will be required to carry through with austerity and attacks on benefits and workers pay demands.
This, in turn, will provoke a massive backlash in the working class – sickened and angered by thirteen years of Toryism, and by Starmer’s Tory-lite agenda. Just like the Winter of Discontent (1978-79) the trade unions will be pushed into outright opposition and Starmer’s support will quickly diminish.
Meanwhile, there are rumours that letters of no confidence in Rishi Sunak are being collected. It takes just 54 letters to trigger a no confidence vote, which would take place sometime near Christmas. With a party so ripped apart as this one it seems joining forces to fight Labour will be beyond them. They will have at least four years to lick their wounds.
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